What else to do with sorrow but to buy her a drink, walk it over to her table, set it down in front of her (Sorrow is a woman, always has been, always will), and say the only pick-up line you’ve ever heard that works, “Drink this until I start to look handsome.” And she’ll…
We interfere with what we know by knowing it. We interfere with what we do by doing it. We interfere with what we love by loving it. I guess you could say we’re the causes of our own loneliness. We interfere with what we watch by watching it. We interfere with what we write by…
It’s been over a year since he was last seen near the park’s boathouse, where birdwatchers congregate for coffee and small children lob oversized chunks of stale bread at the ducks, igniting and re-igniting their squabble. Fluorescent flyers–Missing husband and father of two, 40 years old, seizure disorder— have been replaced with more recent sightings;…
Like a river at night, her hair, the sky starless, streetlights glossing the full dark of it: Was she Jewish? I was seventeen, an “Afro-American” senior transferred to a suburban school that held just a few of us. And she had light-brown eyes and tight tube tops and skin white enough to read by…
"Well, you have hair on your vagina. That’s a real buzzkill." This was the response my boyfriend, Brian, gave me when some time around our three-month anniversary I got up the courage to address our disappointing sex life. Later that night, when I called an old roommate to confirm that it was normal to have…
Fall 2009 Cynie Cory‘s "Upper Peninsula Woods" is from White Out, a work in progress. Author of American Girl, Cory currently directs teens in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Louise DeSalvo is the Jenny Hunter Endowed Scholar for Creative Writing and Literature at Hunter College. Among her publications are Virginia Woolf, Writing as a Way of Healing,…
Almost ready, she says as I walk into the drugstore, this strange woman who swivels her neck, to cock her head back at me, while adjusting her bra under her clothes, and I don’t know if she means the rapture, or if she’s waiting for some violence, tires squealing, to drag her off by her…
The senior poet collected things. Porcelain and carved hands, postcards, cobalt glass miniatures, World’s Fair memorabilia, contemporary art. I managed his calendar and his townhouse and his art collection, as well as the more domestic routines of buying groceries and cooking dinner five nights a week—if he wasn’t dining out. He’d made clear in the…
A few years ago, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, sitting in the offices of Inprint, Inc., a literary nonprofit based in Houston, Texas, I asked Tony Hoagland if he considered himself to be a cat poet or an ox poet. Rich Levy, another Houston poet, was in the kitchen slicing us an apple to share…
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